B. Find their keywords

Now, you want to find the keywords that your competitors are targeting in their SEO strategy.

One of the simplest and most effective ways of doing this is to check their source code.

Start with their homepage, right-click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect.”

Then look for <meta name=”keywords”> in the <head> section. You can use Ctrl-F to quickly search for it.

This shows you all the keywords being used on the page.

2. Tracking Competitor Keywords

Now that you know what keywords your competitors are targeting, you should also carefully monitor those keywords so you can easily see which ones perform well for your competitors (and which ones don’t).

Staying across the “strength” of your competitors’ keywords will help you find new opportunities for building on your SEO strategy and improving your rankings.

It’s also how you’ll get those valuable insights that we’ll talk more about in the next section.

Like with most things, there are several ways to monitor your competitors’ keywords.

For example, you could check their source code every week for any new keywords…

Or, you can search for particular keywords in your browser, and see where your competition is positioned in the SERPs…

With your competitors already added from the last step, all you have to do now is add the keywords you want to track, and it will all be done for you!

This time, click on “Rank Tracker” from the main menu.

Then, click on the plus sign at the top-right of your screen to add all your competitors’ keywords that you found.

Once all their keywords are added, scroll down the page to see where exactly they rank for each keyword compared to where you rank for it.

Now Monitor Backlinks will automatically track your keyword rankings and send you regular updates on how you’re doing compared to your competitors.

Easy, right?

3. Using Competitor Keyword Insights to Improve Your SEO

As we mentioned above, monitoring your competitors’ keywords will help you to rebuild and improve your SEO strategy—especially when it comes to content strategies, which is what you’d typically use to rank for certain keywords.

Based on your competitor keyword monitoring, you’ll be able to discover opportunities to improve your own content and keyword strategy.

If your competitors have better rankings on certain keywords, that means it’s time to put more work into your content.

Take a look at this example keyword, “how to manage a blog:”

You can see that our example site is not currently ranking for it (in fact, it dropped 95 places from position #25). Our competitors, on the other hand, are ranking in position #9 and #75.

So we need to do some work!

Meanwhile, if your competitors aren’t ranking well for certain keywords, then it’s the best time for you to take advantage of them.

They may not have updated their content in a while, or just aren’t keeping an eye on their rankings.

It’s a good opportunity for you to swoop in and steal their spots!

To boost your rankings above your competitors, you can do some of the below things:

Update your existing content

You could make it longer, add more research, or create a unique infographic to go with it.

Create more content

You can also write more content on the same topic, to cover every possible angle and give you a higher chance of ranking. If you give it some thought, you should be able to come up with 2-5 new blog posts about a topic.

Here’s a tip for finding new angles on a topic: Write the opposite!

For example, if you’ve already done an article on “10 Ways to Improve the Way You Manage a Blog,” you could go the opposite way and write an article on “10 Don’ts of Managing a Blog.”

Build more backlinks

Link building is arguably even more important than the on-site SEO itself.

Your content might be amazing, your pages load fast and you have alt tags on every image, but if other websites don’t link to you, honestly, you just won’t have good results.

This will show you any websites that are using your images and infographics. If you find that any of the websites are using the images without linking back to you, just email the site owners to ask them to credit your image with a backlink.

You can get a lot of free backlinks this way, with very little or no effort!

Keywords are very significant for your website. If you have great keyword rankings, you’ll have great SEO—and the opposite is true, too.

Razvan Girmacea is the CEO and Founder of Competitors App, a monitoring application that will track your competition’s marketing moves. Ex-founder of Monitor Backlinks. Passionate about Start-ups and talking to other entrepreneurs. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

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